Some cool art deco chairs images:

Lobby Details


Image by catchesthelight
I wish I could tell you if these old chairs were original to the Winterhaven but I can’t – I’m just assuming they are period art deco and found nearby in Miami Beach.

Period Dining


Image by catchesthelight
These chairs in context remind me of some of what I found at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in their 20th century furniture collections. I wish I could tell you if these old chairs were original to the Winterhaven but I can’t – I’m just assuming they are period art deco and found nearby in Miami Beach.

Deco loungers


Image by Trisha Weir
I like to think about how the objects in our lives influence our existence, and in reverse, I suppose, about how our bodies influence the objects we create. For example, if we all had 12 fingers, would pianos be built differently?

But back to this picture — the posture required by these chairs is so severe. In 1939 when the station was built, women had begun to wear corsets, girdles and garters again after the flapper eras of shimmy and slouch. Beaded shifts had given way to velvet and crepe bias-cut dresses with minimal bustlines and sleekness over the hips, but full sleeves, which slowly shifted to the cinched-waist material efficient hourglass of the 1940s.

Anyway; these are the sort of chairs you sit in while wearing a rather uncomfortable traveling suit. Straight posture, and perhaps a stiff upper lip. Objects to fit our existences.

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Update August 2008

I don’t mind my theories being proven wrong by Kate Moss.

Donna Karan’s A/W 2008 ad campaign features Kate half-slouched half-draped across these very chairs, in full luxe-disheveled travel-glamour mode. Gorgeous, and entirely different from the image I’d previously had for Union Station.

i193.photobucket.com/albums/z55/ajbar7/kate-moss-donna-ka…